Â Â There was a time in America in the not very distant past when things were very different.Â

Just a few decades ago, we were respected in the international community, rarely loved, sometimes hated, but usually respected.Â There was a time when America had a secure border which defined us as a nation, when weÂ felt free to voiceÂ our opinions without being condemned as bigots, when government functioned in the interests of the governed, a time when we were a free and sovereign nation not subject to the vagariesÂ and enmities of the 191 other countries in the United Nations.Â

That time and those times are long past and not solely because of a single political party or one politician, although our current president has far outdone the others, busily underminingÂ not only our economy but everything the United States of America has stood for, starting with our status as a country worthy of respect.Â Â

Â Â Last Thursday we saw a vivid example of international disrespect that would never have occurred in the past:Â A contingent of of Mexico’s Secretaria de Seguridad Publica federal police force perpetrated an incursion onto American soil not seen since the insolence ofÂ Santa Anna during the Mexican War.Â Â

Santa AnnaÂ was crushed in the battle of San Jacinto but last week Mexican forces showed their contempt for that American victory and for the American nation.

An El Paso witness reported that Mexican policeÂ fired atÂ American hunters on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande and other Mexicans followed that attack “with automatic weapons into the U.S. side . . . stole hunters’ chairs and drove back into Mexico.”Â (http://bit.ly/n2fWKr)Â Â

Our authorities are investigating the incident but aside from the theft of a few chairs, will they investigate the temerity of Mexicans invading our nation?Â Not likely, since we have already granted carte blanche toÂ them and everyone else to violate our borders, thumbÂ their noses at the United States–and steal our chairs.Â Â

Almost worse, some Americans are now so terrified of political incorrectness that they have sacrificed lives on the PC altar.Â

Former-Democrat, now Independent, always-liberal Connecticut’s Senator Joe Lieberman has offered the very valid opinion that had it not been for fear of being labeled prejudiced Muslim MajorÂ Nidal Hasan wouldn’t have been able toÂ kill and maimÂ innocent people at Fort Hood in 2009.Â

Â Â Despite Hasan’s obviousÂ threats against non-Muslim, American troops,Â threats “that he thought a Muslim-American soldier would be justified in killing his comrades in defense of Islamâ€Â and other warnings of his plans, his fellow soldiers felt intimidated by PC, said nothing, nada,Â wala shy in Arabic.Â

If reported, such homicidal statementsÂ would have madeÂ Hasan a candidate for discharge if not a court marshall and pre-empted his jihadist mayhem.Â Lieberman suggests that the failure to turn him in “came from a fear of making waves, and particularly making waves that would cause the people who were making them and reporting Hasan [might] put them in jeopardy of being labeled as prejudiced.”Â (http://bit.ly/qMC6jw)

And ambitious soldiers wouldn’t dare take that risk.Â And 13 people died and 30 others were wounded–as a direct result of political correctness, a fact of American life as odious as the divisive quest forÂ diversity.Â Â

The El Paso hunters escaped being murdered even if the Fort Hood victims did not but they still represent an inconsequential number as contrastedÂ with the anticipated victims of Obamacare.Â

Â Â There’s a bright light at the end of the Obamacare tunnel, not bright for patients, and certainly not for doctors whoÂ play by the outdated Hippocratic rule of primum non nocere, to first do no harm to those patients.Â Â Â

As Paul Hseih illustrates in “How ObamacareÂ Plays Games with Your Life,” due to the built-in, inequitable facets of the PCAA, when an ObamacareÂ patientÂ consultsÂ a physicianÂ because ofÂ a chronic headache, the doctor could very well say he doesn’t need an MRI and should “just take two Tylenol and call me in the morning.â€Â Â Â

Hsieh asks, isÂ ”the doctor is giving his best objective medical advice, or being swayed by the latest memo from the ACO administrator demanding greater cost savings”?Â Â Â

The bright lights of Obamacare will shine for the 1400 institutions–predominantly labor unions supporting Obama–and for newly-hatched “accountable care organizations,” ACO’s, for “lobbyists, consultants, and less-scrupulous hospitals and doctors willing to ‘game’ the system to their advantage.” (http://bit.ly/pBfgBB)

They will have a “gold mine” and will beÂ ready and equipped to manage the shoals of the intentionally-labyrinthine complexities of the skillfully-misnomered PatientÂ Care and Affordability Act.Â

Pledges and promises to the contrary, medical care will have to be rationed if and whenÂ Obama’s brainchildÂ is ever fully implemented and, as for affordability, that would depend on the definition of “affordable.”Â Affordable for Obamacare to administer?Â Affordable to doctors and hospitals more concerned with staying within governement cost guidelines than with their patients’ well-being?Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

Obamacare is a crapshoot, at best, though not for members of Congress who guilefully exempted themselves from itsÂ inequities and itsÂ expenses in terms of human lives.Â It is a crapshoot in which average schleps rolled craps and just another instance of how much the AmericanÂ Dream, American values, and American ideals haveÂ disintegrated.Â Â

There is no man or woman, least of all Barack Hussein Obama, who is capable of bringing down our nation.Â We can only be destroyed from within by forces–not individuals–intent on undermining theÂ principles on which America was founded: life, all human life, liberty, inclusive of the freedom to speak without prohibition, and the pursuit of happiness exclusive of governmental restrictions on how and how long we should live.

The news on our doorstep and on our horizon may be ominous but it’s avoidable.Â We needn’t worry if other nations respect us–as long as we respect ourselves and act accordingly.